Weapon of the Weak or Empowering the Powerful? European and international law as a resource for national interest groups

Why do some interest groups in some countries use EU law litigation as part of their advocacy strategies while others do not? The literature on mobilising European law has offered many answers, but much of the research has focussed on individual case studies and suffered from the problem of overemphasising positive cases, i.e. those interest groups that litigate. It is more difficult methodologically to identify those groups that could have litigated but chose not to or those that would have liked to litigate but were not able to. The proposed paper provides a solution to this problem by drawing on data from a large scale survey of European interest groups (the ‘Comparative Interest Group Survey’, www.cigsurvey.eu) which allows for a detailed comparative analysis with significant variance on the dependent variable (the use of litigation, and specifically the use of EU law). The paper will use data from surveys conducted in Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland Slovenia and Sweden. While groups use litigation rarely in comparison to other advocacy tactics, the dataset contains information on more than 200 groups that have used EU law to challenge a national law or practise. The proposed paper investigates whether there is something special about EU law litigation or whether it fits into the overall pattern of groups that employ litigation as an advocacy tactic. In particular, it will investigate whether EU law offers opportunities to national ‘outsiders’, i.e. groups with little or antagonistic ties to national policy-makers. It will also provide an overview of which policy fields are particularly prone to a mobilisation of EU law, and how strategy choice differs across countries.